Cardiac arrest, exposure to high-voltage power lines, and other trauma to the body can result in ventricular fibrillation which is the rapid and uncoordinated contraction of the myocardium. The use of external defibrillators to restore the heartbeat to its normal pace through the application of electrical shock is a well-recognized and important tool in resuscitating patients. External defibrillation is used in emergency settings in which the patient is either unconscious or otherwise unable to communicate.
Automated external defibrillators (AEDs) are used by first responders such as police officers, paramedics, and other emergency medical technicians to resuscitate cardiac arrest patients. The AED must be used quickly and properly by the first responder, since the chance of successfully resuscitating the patient decreases approximately 10 percent-per-minute following cardiac arrest.
With the advent of emerging technologies such as AEDs, emergency medical systems (EMS) have greater opportunities for saving lives. However, because of increasing health care costs, an elevated standard of care, and competitiveness in the health care provider market, EMS directors must improve their management of cardiac rescue events with AEDs.
Unfortunately, current attempts at managing performance of sudden cardiac arrest rescues suffer from a lack of coordination and cohesiveness that is necessary to accurately and comprehensively track and evaluate out-of-hospital cardiac arrest rescues. For example, data regarding a cardiac rescue attempt typically arrives to the EMS director from several sources, occurring at different points in time, and commonly in different formats which must be integrated away from the cardiac rescue site. Moreover, current techniques of reviewing cardiac rescue events lack the appropriate data to make significant strides in improving the quality of out-of-hospital cardiac arrests. Finally, conventional computer-based tools for integrating and reviewing cardiac rescue data inflexibly require separate review and analysis of the incident, the AED and AED operator performance, and the ECG.